[Reader-list] The Museum in the Age of Mass Media

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

The Museum in the Age of Mass Media

Boris Groys

Translated by Matthew Partridge


It's true: there is still a large audience that enjoys visiting museums 
these days. But in general, as an institution the museum is increasingly 
being viewed with scepticism and mistrust by the selfsame audience. On 
all sides one repeatedly hears that the institutional boundaries of the 
museum ought to be transgressed, deconstructed or simply removed to give 
contemporary art full freedom to assert itself in real life. At first 
glance these attacks on the museum in the name of some or other 
contemporary, living art have a very familiar ring about them - they 
sound rather like a sequel to the demands voiced by the various 
avant-garde movements of the twentieth century that called for the art 
system and, in particular, the museum to be demolished, transcended and 
disbanded to make way for new art. Such appeals and demands have 
meanwhile become quite commonplace, even to the extent of now being 
regarded as a cardinal feature of contemporary art. But as we all know, 
these avant-garde demands in fact led merely to the emergence of new art 
forms that in the course of time also found their rightful place in the 
museum. So, as an institution the museum has adopted a relaxed, if not 
blatantly benevolent attitude towards these appeals and demands that 
once threatened its very existence - in the expectant hope that new and 
interesting art might be directly fostered by such attacks. Present-day 
calls for the abolition of the museum appear to take up on these earlier 
avant-garde strategies and so continue, virtually unchallenged, to be 
whole-heartedly embraced by the museum. But appearances are deceiving. 
The context, meaning and function of the calls to abolish the museum 
system have undergone fundamental change since the days of the 
avant-garde, even if at first sight the style and diction of their 
formulation seems so familiar.
Prevailing tastes in the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth 
centuries were defined and embodied by the museum. The criteria on which 
the museum based its choice of 'good' art were generally accepted as the 
social norm. So in these circumstances any protest directed at the 
museum was simultaneously a protest against the prevailing norms of 
art-making - and by the same token also the basis from which new, 
groundbreaking art could evolve. But in its present context the museum 
has indisputably been stripped of its normative role. In our own era it 
is the mass media that dictate aesthetic norms, having long since 
dethroned the museum from its crucial social role. The general public 
now draws its notion of art from advertising, MTV, videos, video games 
and Hollywood blockbusters. Whether this notion of art is good or bad is 
a mute question: it is what it is. All that matters is that in the 
context of contemporary, media-generated tastes this call to abandon and 
dismantle the museum as an institution has taken on an entirely 
different meaning than when it was voiced during the avant-garde era. 
Nowadays this protest is no longer part of the struggle waged against 
prevailing normative tastes in the name of innovation but is, inversely, 
aimed at stabilizing and entrenching currently prevailing tastes. When 
people today speak of 'real life', what they generally mean is the 
global media market. This is why art that enters life under such 
conditions can never really be 'new' art, because the demands and 
criteria practised by the media market have always been broadly 
familiar. Anyone calling for the museum to be transcended is no longer 
remonstrating against prevailing norms or the dominance and censorship 
institutionally practised by the museum. Instead, such an outcry 
represents populist repudiation of a minority, of any deviation from the 
norm and of aesthetic positions that differ from those currently 
propagated by the media. In order to properly assess the predicament of 
the museum as an institution one must first acknowledge the fact that, 
rather than representing the majority of those interested in art and 
culture as it did in the past, the museum now only speaks for a minority.

Art institutions, however, are still typically displayed in the media as 
places of selection, where specialists, insiders and the initiated few 
pass preliminary judgment on what is permitted to rate as art in 
general, and what in particular as ‘good’ art. This selection process is 
based on criteria that to a wider audience seem unfathomable, 
incomprehensible and, in the final count, also irrelevant. Accordingly, 
one wonders just why anyone at all is needed to decide what art is and 
what is not. Why can't we just choose for ourselves what we wish to 
acknowledge or appreciate as art without recourse to an intermediary, 
without patronizing advice curators and art critics? Why does art refuse 
to seek legitimation on the open media market just like any other 
product? From a media perspective the traditional aspirations of the 
museum seem historically obsolete, out-of-touch, insincere and somewhat 
bizarre. And contemporary art itself time and again displays an 
eagerness to follow the enticements of the mass media age, voluntarily 
abandoning the museum in the quest to be disseminated through media 
channels. Of course, this readiness on the part of art to become 
involved in the media, in broader public communication and politics, in 
other words to engage in life beyond the boundaries of the museum, is 
quite understandable. This approach allows it to address and seduce a 
much larger audience; it is a decent way of earning money - which the 
artist previously had to beg for from the state or private sponsors. It 
gives the artist a new sense of power, social relevance and public 
presence within his or her own time - preferable to eking out a meagre 
existence as the poor relation of the media. So the call to break loose 
from the museum also amounts de facto to a call to medialize and 
commercialize art by accommodating it to the aesthetic norms generated 
by today's media. But given that the museum has been divested of its 
function as the arbiter of taste, one is nonetheless left wondering why 
it still continues to hold such strong attraction for the general 
public, including the media.

Firstly, seen from a media perspective, the criteria for the evaluation 
of art as practised in museums appear, as mentioned above, to be totally 
obscure, incomprehensible and even somewhat mysterious. Curiously, 
though, this does not mean that the media automatically denigrate 
museums since they are equally fascinated by all that is hidden, dark, 
obscure and marginal. The museum-trained eye itself is fascinated by 
life outside the museum, by reality and the media. By contrast, the 
media is intrigued by the idea of casting light on the hidden and 
closed-off recesses of the museum, of enlightening the public about its 
dark secrets and rendering the museum's isolated and private inner 
precincts accessible to media-based communication. On the whole, the 
strategies behind museum collections and exhibitions are treated in the 
media as the workings of a shadowy conspiracy, as an intrigue 
masterminded by insiders, as a display of the hidden power of curators 
and museum directors far removed from any form of democratic 
legitimation - in other words, as an impenetrable swindle. But at the 
same time this dark secret exerts a magnetic attraction on the media: 
they suspect it might hold an interesting source of information in 
store. This aspect, incidentally, is corroborated by the introduction of 
film and video installations into the museum, which is accompanied by 
the darkening of museum space. This development has extinguished the 
museum's traditional light, casting the museum space in darkness and 
transposing the viewer into a nervous trance. Here the museum is 
directly manifesting itself as what it has come to represent in the age 
of mass media, as a tenebrous location of secrecy, conspiracy and 
half-visibility. Thus, in its new role the museum has maintained its 
appeal for the media and the broad public precisely as site of 
strangeness, deviation and inexplicability - as a 'kunstkammer' of the 
contemporary world which has lost its licence to define prevailing 
aesthetic norms.

By the same token, however, there is also something about the museum 
that clearly irritates the media, namely everything that has to do with 
theoretical discourse addressed at art in general or the museum in 
particular. Almost every time a museum exhibition is suspected of 
voicing a theoretical, critical claim the media react with unveiled 
animosity, The sole excuse that can save an exhibition in such 
circumstances is if 'in spite of its theoretical pretensions' it can be 
said to be sensual and attractive - and hence ultimately irrelevant. At 
first glance this reaction by the media might seem rather odd. After 
all, being theoretical surely means being open to communication, and the 
media is in fact supposed to welcome all communicative endeavours. But 
in reality, the only artistic and curatorial decisions truly celebrated 
the media are those that appear to be purely subjective, ungrounded and 
intuitive. Nowadays the media have ceased to celebrate the individual 
artist as a genius. Instead, we now witness how the entire museum system 
per se is hailed as a genius, as a place where arbitrary, 
incomprehensible decisions are made about what constitutes art and what 
does not, about what is rated good art and what is not. This is nothing 
less than a bizarre continuation of the cult of the genius in the wake 
of the 'ready-made' principle. Whereas on the one hand post-Duchamp art 
is criticized and ironized for its allegedly random display of artistic 
and curatorial power on the other the media are mesmerized by this same 
power, ready to salute anyone who seems capable of achieving success by 
pulling off such purportedly arbitrary and gratuitous decisions. The 
ready-made procedure is now considered to be the last enigma of our age, 
a last possible act of pure subjective choice - and even more so if 
people are not ready to comply with the arbitrariness of this choice. In 
the media we are now witnessing a strange aestheticization of the museum 
as a place of enigma, mystery and quasi-religiosity.

Accordingly, every instance of theoretical or critical reasoning is 
treated like an objectionable act of secularization aimed at robbing the 
museum of its enigmatic aura and thereby, so it would seem, definitively 
draining it of appeal. Most significantly, however, theoretical 
discourse calls into question the fundamental ideological premise 
underlying the way today's media operate. For, as those running the 
media ceaselessly claim, far from promoting their own norms or 
propagating tastes of their own making (let alone even having 'their 
own' tastes), the media simply provide what their audience 'wants to 
see' - in the proverbial manner of: bait is meant to attract fish, not 
fishermen. It is precisely this notion that leads people in the media to 
believe they have the upper hand, to feel they are historically more 
progressive than the classical museum they denounce as normative, 
didactic and authoritarian. Thus the key perceived difference between 
the traditional museum and contemporary media lies in the assumption 
that museums try to imposetheir aesthetic agenda on people, while the 
media merely wish to lend expression to existing mass-democratic tastes. 
But on closer inspection there is something highly problematic about the 
view the media have of themselves. Anyone familiar with the workings of 
the media today knows that they are constantly promoting their latest 
array of products by claiming them to be different, new, up-to-date or 
even pioneering. Novelty, or rather topicality, is presented in the 
media as a value in its own right to which the consumer is expected to 
subordinate his personal tastes. So on the one hand the media profess 
they are simply satisfying existing tastes, while on the other they are 
directly and indirectly canvassing for these tastes to be revised and 
adjusted to the zeitgeist. Consequently, it can hardly be claimed that 
the media market provides the consumer only with what he 'really' wants 
to see and hear - without any form of patronizing control. On the 
contrary, at every turn he is being lectured and instructed about what 
supposedly constitutes the current zeitgeist - and what does not.

The question is, however, can one really learn from the media what is 
specifically contemporary about the present? In my view the answer is no 
- and for one simple reason: the global media market lacks the 
historical memory which would enable it to compare the past with the 
present and thereby determine what is really new and genuinely 
contemporary about the present. The old product range in the media 
market is constantly being replaced by new merchandise, barring any 
possibility of comparing what is on offer today with what used to be 
available. As a result, media commentary has no choice but to turn to 
fashion. But fashionability itself is by no means self-evident or 
indisputable. While it is perhaps easy for us to admit that in the age 
of mass media our lives are dictated predominantly by fashion, how 
confused we suddenly become when asked to say precisely what is en vogue 
just now. So who can actually say what is fashionable at any given 
moment? Passing any kind of judgement in this is highly problematic, 
particularly in these times of globalization. For instance, if something 
appears to have become fashionable in Berlin, one could quickly point 
out that this trend has long since gone out of fashion measured against 
what is currently fashionable in, say, Tokyo or Los Angeles. Yet who can 
guarantee that the same Berlin fashion won't at some later date also hit 
the streets of Los Angeles or Tokyo? So, when it comes to assessing the 
market, we are de facto at the blind mercy of advice dispensed by 
marketing and fashion gurus, the purported specialists of international 
fashion. Yet such advice cannot be verified by the individual since, as 
everyone knows, the global market is too vast for him alone to fathom. 
Hence, where the media market is concerned one has the simultaneous 
impression of being bombarded relentlessly with something new and also 
of permanently witnessing the return of the same over and over again. 
The familiar complaint that there is nothing new in art has the same 
root as the opposite charge that art is constantly striving only to 
appear new. As long as the observer has nothing but the media as a point 
of reference he simply lacks any comparative context which would afford 
him means of effectively distinguishing between old and new, between 
what is the same and what is different.

It is the museum that gives the observer this opportunity to 
differentiate between old and new, and to critically challenge with his 
own eyes what the media insist is novel, up-to-date and ground breaking, 
For museums are repositories of historical memory where everything is 
kept and shown that has gone out of fashion, that has become old and 
out-dated. In this respect only the museums can serve as sites of 
systematic historical comparison that enable us to ascertain what really 
is different, new and contemporary - and to discover what is making 
false claims to be so, something that, although produced in the present, 
might in fact merely be repeating long-established patterns. The same, 
incidentally, applies to the assertions of cultural difference or 
cultural identity that persistently bombard us in the media. In order to 
critically challenge these claims we again require some form of 
comparative framework. Where no such comparison is possible all claims 
of difference and identity remain unfounded and hollow. Indeed, every 
important art exhibition in a museum offers such a comparison, even if 
this is not explicitly enacted, for each museum exhibition inscribes 
itself into an entire history of exhibitions that is documented within 
the art system. Naturally, the strategies of comparison pursued by 
individual curators and critics can in turn also be criticized, but such 
a critique is possible only because these too can be measured against 
various other curatorial strategies in evidence within the art system. 
In other words, the very idea of abandoning or even abolishing the 
museum would remove the possibility of holding a critical inquiry into 
the claims of innovation and difference with which we are constantly 
confronted in today's media. This also explains why the assessments and 
selection criteria in museum art shows so frequently differ from those 
that prevail in the mass media. The issue here is not that curators and 
art initiates have exclusive and elitist tastes quite distinct from 
those of the broad public, but that the museum offers a means of 
comparing the present with the past that repeatedly arrives at other 
conclusions than those implied by the media. An individual observer 
would not necessarily be in a position to undertake such a comparison if 
the media were all he had to rely on. So it is hardly surprising that 
the media also end up adopting the museum's diagnosis of what exactly is 
contemporary about the present, simply because they themselves are 
unable to perform a diagnosis of their own.

It is primarily the museum of contemporary art that offers a framework 
for this diagnosis. Although the concept of the 'museum of contemporary 
art' is now broadly familiar, it nonetheless still represents a 
fundamentally new angle in our way of seeing the museum as an 
institution. Traditionally, the museum used to function as a place where 
evidence of the past was stored and assembled into an overall picture 
that was then held to be a socially binding representation of history. 
 From this perspective, though, the museum of contemporary art would 
appear to be a paradox. However close to the present moment new art is 
being collected, this practice of collecting will always seem to arrive 
just a little too late - and will inevitably remain at least one step 
behind the present. Accordingly, 'real’ contemporary developments in art 
seem never to be caught up by the collecting process or by 
museographical re-presentation. It is often said that the museum might 
perhaps be capable of collecting yesterday, but never today. This, by 
the way is precisely the point where media claims appear most plausible. 
For, as is frequently claimed, new art first has to establish itself in 
life - in the global media market, to be precise - before it can then be 
enshrined in the museum, in other words, only once it has achieved 
success and endorsement in the market and therewith also social legitimacy.

Yet the historical relevance of any art is clearly not identical with 
its propagation in the media. As mentioned above, the 'now-ness' of art 
only becomes apparent in historical comparison, not by being circulated 
in the media. It is still pertinent to talk about the age of 
enlightenment or the era of the artistic avant-garde in spite of the 
glaring fact that both the enlightenment or the artistic avant-garde 
were only of concern to imperceptibly marginal minorities and by no 
means reflected the mentality of the absolute majority of the population 
at the time. This means that today's museums are in fact machines 
designed not merely to collect, but also to generate the present through 
their comparison between old and new, between identical and different. 
There is no basis to the notion that the process of creating art occurs 
first in the media before it is subsequently represented in the museum. 
Instead, we only recognize something as being up-to-date, truly 
contemporary and thus 'real' art once we realize that this art has yet 
to be collected by or represented in the museum. Rather than reality 
coming first, with its museum re-presentation following on in second 
place, it is the museum collection that tells us what in the here and 
now may be considered real. In other words, the museum of contemporary 
art is ultimately a producer of contemporary art by the way it 
establishes what has not yet been collected and thus what, by 
implication, must be 'contemporary'. By contrast, in the context of mass 
media art is condemned to constantly reiterating certain external 
features in an attempt to make art publicly identifiable as art. Thus 
the media promote a kind of art that is often erroneously called 'museum 
art', in other words, the kind that strives to be demonstrably artistic, 
spectacular and extraordinary - which is why such art never manages to 
cut itself free from traditional genres. Admittedly, among all the 
media-tailored appropriations of traditional artistic prototypes there 
are also examples of shifts, modifications and reinventions that do 
indeed have aesthetic appeal. Yet, here too, all such shifts and 
deviations can only be recognized as such once they have been held up 
for comparison in the museum with their historical precursors. When 
shown in the media, these appropriations merely spawn a sense of malaise 
since there is no aesthetic framework at hand to properly assess them 
by. But even when the media with their plethora of reality shows 
endeavour to present unspectacular, everyday life, all they are doing is 
quoting the 'ready-made' procedure that was embraced by the museum long 
before, thereby revealing their debt to museum tradition.

In the age of mass media the museum seems likely to perform the 
following task. It has lost its traditional role of setting aesthetic 
norms and defining public taste, a function that is now been assumed by 
the media. But for their part, the media have proved incapable of 
reflecting upon their own role. For a start, they lack any historical 
memory that might enable them to lend precise definition to the current 
norm as such - and, most importantly, the media are trapped in a state 
of permanent self-denial. They might prescribe aesthetic norms by 
invoking the zeitgeist, but in the same breath they would rather not 
admit to this accomplishment being their own, pretending instead that 
they are merely following audience tastes. Hence, for all their 
loquaciousness the media in fact cultivate a strange zone of muteness 
that manifests a deep-set incapacity to discuss their own role as active 
norm-setters - let alone to critically examine these norms in the light 
of their own claims that they embody the zeitgeist. It would be a 
disastrous mistake if the museum were also to emulate this strategy of 
self-denial and likewise strive to fulfil the claim that it is only 
showing people 'what they want to see'. For in stark contrast to the 
mass media, museums possess the means and possibilities to be sites of 
critical discourse. Furthermore, given our current cultural climate the 
museum is practically the only place where we can actually step back 
from our own present and compare it with other eras. In these terms, the 
museum is irreplaceable because it is particularly well suited to 
critically analyze and challenge the claims of the media-driven zeitgeist.